Almost as soon as Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., felt lightheaded last Wednesday and checked into George Washington University Hospital, conservatives unleashed a torrent of criticisms disguised as concerns. The pundit Carmine Sabia said he hoped that Fetterman recovers but that “the voters of Pennsylvania were lied to.” The Washington Examiner published its piece about Fetterman’s hospitalization under the headline “John Fetterman made it one month in the Senate before being hospitalized.” Fetterman suffered a stroke in May as he was running for the U.S. Senate seat, and he was forced to take some time off the campaign trail as he recovered.
Conservatives unleashed a torrent of criticisms disguised as concerns.
On Friday, the same day Fetterman was released from the hospital with test results finding no evidence that he’d had a seizure or another stroke, The New York Times described how Fetterman was working to balance his recovery from a stroke with his new job as a senator and how his team was working to get the archaic institution that is the U.S. Senate to accommodate his needs. That report led to even more bad-faith discussions.
Referring to Fetterman’s stroke in the Times article, the senator’s chief of staff Adam Jentleson said, “What you’re supposed to do to recover from this is do as little as possible.” However, he said that Fetterman “was forced to do as much as possible — he had to get back to the campaign trail.” Julie Gunlock of the Independent Women’s Forum described Jentleson’s description of Fetterman pushing himself to win the campaign as “abuse.”
Brigitte Gabriel, the right-wing conservative activist, wrote in a tweet: “I hope John Fetterman is okay, but this is just proof he shouldn’t have been running for Senate. Shame on his wife."
Right-wing sports pundit Clay Travis, who took over Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, tweeted: “I feel bad for the guy, Democrats — and his own family — were willing to kill him to win the seat.”
First off, let’s admit that these conservatives are most likely not that concerned about Fetterman’s well-being. He has been the subject of their rage ever since he appeared on television and rebutted claims about voter fraud in Pennsylvania coming from former President Donald Trump and other Republicans such as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Even if he hadn’t pushed back on those claims, Republicans wouldn’t like Fetterman because he won a seat that the GOP had held from 1969 to 2023 (with the brief exception of 2009 to 2011 when Arlen Specter switched from being a Republican to a Democrat.) On top of that, Fetterman’s record as a Bernie Sanders-supporting progressive has to infuriate them.
Republicans are talking about Fetterman’s health mainly because they don’t like that he beat them and also because they think that his stroke and his subsequent speech difficulties should have disqualified him in the eyes of voters. Many Republicans — and indeed many in Washington —thought Fetterman’s performance at the debate against Republican Mehmet Oz where he used closed captions and at times struggled to speak would be a mark against him.
Let’s admit that these conservatives are most likely not that concerned about Fetterman’s well-being.
The opposite was true for some voters. When I covered a Pittsburgh rally with former President Barack Obama the weekend before the election, many attendees (and even my Lyft driver) said they knew people who had had strokes and they knew that people who’d had strokes could recover.
Contrary to what Fetterman’s conservative critics might think, people saw his experience in having had a stroke not as a mark against him but rather as a sign of his resiliency. And all the while Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to admit that Oz was a bad candidate. After the election, even outgoing Sen. Pat Toomey, the Pennsylvania Republican who preceded Fetterman, continued to insist that Oz was a good candidate.
The New York Times story, which so many conservatives used to criticize Fetterman and those around him, did a poor job discussing issues of disability. We can start with the fact that the article used the term “special needs” when talking about Fetterman. Many people with disabilities — myself included — have long loathed that term not only because it obfuscates the obstacles the world puts in front of disabled people but also because it implies that accommodations are a form of special treatment and not equal treatment.
Many conservatives railed against my friend, the disabled journalist Sara Luterman, when she made that point, and their criticism of her were equally in bad faith. They also hurled horrific ableist slurs her way. Conversely, as I’ve argued in this space before, providing accommodations allows Fetterman to be held as accountable as nondisabled people.
Like Gabriel, who argued that Fetterman’s wife should be ashamed, other conservatives like Laura Ingraham have said that Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, manipulated her husband. Again, this is a long-running ableist trope that people with disabilities are somehow being manipulated and are somehow vulnerable to manipulation. Though Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review argues that Fetterman’s stroke should have been disqualifying, he was correct to point out that “Nobody ‘forced’ John Fetterman to stay in the race and decline to do what he was ‘supposed’ to.”
But beyond the conversation about Fetterman, conservatives' mockery of disability could create a chilling effect. Fetterman’s disability and his use of tools like speech-to-text could offer a real-world tutorial about how even an institution as old as the Senate can adapt and provide accessibility. But if Fetterman, a U.S. senator, has his accommodations mocked, then people with disabilities with fewer privileges, who already fear disclosing their disabilities to their employer, will be less likely to do so.
